Sequel to the Great App Debate

Well, after much consternation and head-banging during the Great App Debate over what makes for the right features and pricing for our Sleep App; and after reading and re-reading all 43 of your terrifically impressive, informative suggestions that you posted a couple weeks ago; and after picking the brains of our fellow audio publishers, our adult kids, our tech mavins and our business consultants… after all of that, we’ve come up with a resolution we all can live with, that takes into account most of the competing complaints. It was not easy. It was not fun. It will not please everyone. But it’s pretty damn good.

First, we made several improvements to the app. As per your direction, we made it much more of an app. In fact, it’s now functioning as a really smooth and classy, high quality player, all intuitive and Apple-like – a joy to behold. Thank you, Jon Lorenzo.

You can now scroll through the tracks with your digits, poke and pop in a segment and listen to it immediately, just like on your iPod or iPhone. You can jump around the mix, select the tracks you want very smoothly, quickly and easily, unlike the usual clunky, menu-driven, slow stuff that’s available.

We also added a repeat play button. We polished the already swell, Bruce Gigax engineered sound quality. We reduced the pause time between tracks. We enlarged the font on the sleep tip pages, so they’re easier to read. We changed the look and placement of the buttons. And we put in some backward compatibility, which is Geek Speak for: it can now be used on older phones.

And we’ll keep adding improvements. Coming soon: the wake-up alarm feature some of you requested. And we plan to add capacity for you to do your own mixing – raise or lower the volume of the music, independently of the voice, and vice versa. This is great for the hard of hearing, who can’t hear the voice over the music as it’s currently mixed, and for those who like their music louder for accessing a truly juicy trance state.

Perhaps after that, we’ll add a feature that will tuck you in and tell you a bedtime story. (JOKE).

As some of you already know, every time we change this thing, everyone who already bought the app gets the new, improved version – so several of you have already been pleasantly surprised.

In fact, we can see from the stats that over 85% of you original sleep app users are now enjoying the new features. (This also lets us know that you’re actually making regular use of this thing, and therefore it must be helping you to get a good night’s sleep, which makes us all very happy.)

So here’s the thing. We know that our pricing is relatively high for an app. But it’s low for a high quality player like this, with all these features and the unusually superb sound quality it delivers. (Seriously, people: we invite you to compare and contrast with some of those very inexpensive offerings….)

So we’re not undercutting our download price, which was a serious complaint from some of you download purchasers; but we’re offering a much appier app for that price, and it will continue to grow in features and value.

We’ll also be adding brief, freebie apps for those of you who were pretty vociferous about wanting us to do that. So do keep your eyes peeled for free, 5-minute app segments, to help with Sleep, Stress, Weight and Smoking.

Psychotherapist, author and guided imagery pioneer Belleruth Naparstek is the creator of the popular Health Journeys guided imagery audio series. Her latest book on imagery and posttraumatic stress, Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal (Bantam Dell), won the Spirituality & Health Top 50 Books Award